Mouse Paint Children's Book

Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh is a cute story about some mischievous mice that accidentally learn about primary and secondary colors. This story can be a really fun and useful tool for teaching colors and color-mixing to children. It begins with three white mice who are hiding from a cat on a piece of white paper. While the cat is sleeping, they spot some jars of paint - red, yellow and blue. They end up climbing in and then back out of the jars, leaving behind messy paint puddles and very colorful mice! Next each colored mouse steps into a different colored puddle and does a little dance (this is fun to have the children act out!) One color mixes with another and voila!... a new color is formed! This action repeats for each of the three mice. After making the new colors, the mice wash all of the paint off of themselves and then paint the white paper with the new colors by mixing the jars of paint, remembering what they had learned from the puddle dancing. And don't worry, they also remembered to leave some of the paper white so they still had a place to hide from the cat! My kids really enjoy listening to this story again and again. And they always want me to get paints out for them when we're finished so that they can do some color mixing of their own! Even from a very young age, they could remember what colors they needed to mix together to form a new color, thanks to the wonderful story of Mouse Paint.